“Oh Charlotte,“ I said.  “I just love these flowers you picked out for me.  Thank you!  They are so beautiful!  They light up the whole room!“

She looked at me for a moment.  Then slowly, carefully, speaking as if I were the biggest idiot she’d ever met, she responded.  “Um, Mom?  I think that’s the sun.“

—-

Each week I pack the girls up and off we go to speech therapy.  When we started speech therapy, my daughter was evaluated as seven months behind in expressive language and it was very difficult for the speech therapist to get her to engage in any sort of verbalization.

A month or two into it, I stubbed my toe on the couch in the living room.  “OW!“ I screamed.  “WHAT THE FUCK?!“  And both toddlers immediately picked up on it.  For days, they ran around screeching “WUH DUH FUCK!“ while I followed them around trying to fix where I had gone horribly awry.

After several days without hearing any cursing in the home, it seemed like I had finally succeeded.  The next day we had our regularly scheduled speech therapy appointment.  While I was signing my daughter in, the speech therapist came out to ask me a question about something - and halfway through our discussion, my toddler dropped her string cheese on the floor.

“WUH DUH FUCK!“ she screamed loudly.

The whole waiting room, full of children and adults alike, went completely silent.  You could have heard a pin drop.  And without skipping a beat, the speech therapist pulled out her clipboard.  “Okay,“ she said nonchalantly, “So she can say three word phrases now, that’s really excellent!“

And that was that.